When you’ve got a weighty decision on your hands, it can be tough to know what to do. Your emotions and biases can get in the way, because you’re too close to the situation. To help make your decision, think about how you’d advise a friend.

When you’ve got a friend considering a tough choice, it’s easy enough to give them advice. You don’t have to do the work; you’re not worried about the difficulty. Thus, you can give them sound, objective feedback. It might help to remember this when it comes time to make your own tough decisions. Ask yourself what advice you would give a friend, then apply that advice to your own situation. The Essentialist elaborates:

Avoiding discomfort and pain is deeply rooted in our brain that helped us survive for millions of years. But today, facing pain and discomfort does not mean you should avoid it. In fact, more often than not it is smart to embrace it. Think about it. No one ever achieved greatness by staying comfortable and avoiding pain and discomfort. When you give out advice, you can bypass the shit storm of destructive emotions between stimulus and response. You also ditch various biases such as the consistency bias, loss-aversion, social pressure and the negativity bias.

Advertisement

It’s not an absolute. Your advice will probably need more consideration. But the suggestion is to think about what you’d say to someone in your position, then use your own, objective advice as part of your decision.